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by wpietri 2006 days ago
Humans are also naturally violent, but me saying "Hey, I'm going to stab you because I'm just human" is probably not something you'd shrug off.

In particular, what you're indulging here is the naturalistic fallacy, or the is/ought fallacy. What's natural tells us nothing about what's good. Tooth decay is natural and your toothbrush is artificial. But I'd bet you're not going to stop brushing your teeth just to stay philosophically consistent.

1 comments

Yeah, but you can’t put an end to violence, and violence serves an incredible biological purpose. Racism will never cease to exist, nor should society try to force it away, since that will only make things worse. Perhaps racism even serves some meritable biological purpose.

Come to think of it, racism is like a social heuristic. Antivirus software uses heuristic analysis to quickly group certain classes of malware based on code similarity. In the same vein, humans do it to categorize people, based on slightly fuzzier logic.

So what if you can't put an end to violence or racism? In both cases, we can work to minimize them. We can and should.